When Women Were Birds

Fifty-Four Variations on Voice

A Mormon woman is expected to do two things, writes Terry Tempest Williams: bear children and keep a journal. On her deathbed, Williams' mother bequeathed her journals to her writer daughter, but made her promise to not look at them until she was gone. When Williams was finally ready to read the journals, she was shocked by what she found: Every single clothbound book - shelf upon shelf of them, page upon page - was blank.

"When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice" is Williams' attempt to make sense of her mother's silence, and to explore what it means to have a voice - as a woman, a writer, a Mormon, a naturalist, a mortal human being. At once far-reaching and deeply personal, the book touches on everything from the music of John Cage to the secret women's language of Nushu, along with stories from Williams' own life, each illuminating different ways she has claimed and given away her voice.

My Mother's Journals tell me nothing.

My Mother's Journals tell me everything.

Williams displays a Whitmanesque embrace of the world and its contradictions. In spare and lyrical language, marked by her own liberal use of white space, she shows how even our silence - sometimes especially our silence - contains multitudes.

My Mother's Journals are a charity.

My Mother's Journals are a cruelty.

The right-hand margin of "When Women Were Birds" serves as a flip book, a bird flapping its wings at the edge of the page, getting smaller and smaller until it threatens to disappear. Williams' voice does just the opposite - as the pages accumulate, her voice grows in majesty and power until it becomes a full-throated aria.

My Mother's Journals are clouds.

My Mother's Journals are bones.

The book takes on an added timeliness when Williams reveals she is part of the Romney family (her grandmother, Lettie Romney Dixon, was cousins with Mitt Romney's father, George). One can't help but wish that Mitt Romney would read his distant cousin's book. "Birth control gave me my voice," she writes.

Could the GOP front-runner so blithely threaten Planned Parenthood once he read Williams' thoughts about women's relationship with their fertility? "If a man knew what a woman never forgets, he would love her differently," she writes.

In 1996, Williams and her friend Stephen Trimble solicited essays about Utah's Redrock Wilderness and presented the resulting book, "Testimony," to Congress. After the Utah Public Lands Management Act failed and a new national monument was designated, Bill Clinton held up a copy of "Testimony" and said, "This little book made a difference." So will this one - on a more personal, but no less profound, scale. "It's not the lips of a prince that will save us," Williams reminds us, "but our own lips speaking."